book review: you'll never believe me
So, I finished You'll Never Believe Me, the new book by Kari Ferrell, whom you may know as the Hipster Grifter. I wrote briefly about her back in 2023, and of course I put that Substack of hers in my RSS feed. It felt somehow expected when I learned she had a memoir coming out soon--what are you going to do when you are internet famous for a series of petty crimes fifteen years ago, not write a book? That's the sort of shit that haunts you for life. You might as well try to get your story out there and maybe make some money off it in the meanwhile.
It's impossible for me to say whether you will like this book1; for me, I was invested from the start. It's interesting to see the story you followed in real-ish time on Gawker being told from the perspective of the woman who was, at the time, New York's most viral criminal. A lot of the details felt familiar; a few of them placed my understanding of events into a new context. And her descriptions of her experience with the carceral justice system are, I think, invaluable (as any first-hand descriptions of them are).
But the book is at its most interesting as it reaches its conclusion: the years after, of trying to have a steady job only for employers to find out about her criminal record after the fact and fire her for a crime that she has quite literally already done her time for, of trying to go to therapy, of trying, in other words, to get her shit together. Because, not that my opinion really matters, I do, in fact, believe her.
There's a cognitive bias called the fundamental attribution error, wherein we attribute the actions of others to innate qualities they have, rather than to the situations they find themselves in. So when someone lies and steals, it's because they are a liar and a thief, and that's just who they are. I think this is at its strongest with people whose crimes are crimes of deception--it's weirdly easier for people to believe that someone who straight up murdered a guy can change than to believe that a con artist will stop doing a con--but I don't really believe in an immutable self, and even if I did, I believe in redemption. The very least I can offer someone who says they are trying to make the world a better place is to believe them, until they give me a reason not to.
All of which to say, I found this interesting, and it gave me something to think about--enough that I gave it its own post rather than putting it in a media roundup like I was originally expecting.2
Or any book, really? I have been calling these writeups of books "book reviews" for a while but the point is not to review the books, it's to try to engage with them and get my thoughts in order. I need a better term for what I'm doing here than "review."↩
This does mean that the media roundup I was planning on releasing this weekend will be a little sparse, but that's fine, I think.↩